Sabina Spielrein

Abstract

Sabina Spielrein was a Russian psychoanalyst who worked in Zurich, Berlin, Geneva, Moscow and Rostov-on-Don. She influenced many well-known thinkers in psychoanalysis and psychology, including Jung, Freud, Piaget, Claparède, Vygotsky and Luria. After her death in the Shoah, her life and works were largely forgotten until the discovery of correspondence revealing her erotic relationship with Jung. She was then reinvented as a ‘femme fatale’ in popular culture. It is only in the twenty-first century that the details of her life have been properly reconstructed and that psychoanalysts have recognised her stature as an original thinker in many areas, including the death instinct, child development, attachment and evolution. This article gives an account of her life, explores the reasons for her erasure, and examines her two most significant papers.